David Fryer

Toward a Critical Community Psychological Perspective on Unemployment and Mental Health Research

Psychological research has established that unemployment causes widespread psychological distress and ill health in communities but, arguably, little of this research is truly community psychological. In this paper we sketch out a critical community psychological perspective and use it to contribute to understanding of the role of psychosocial aspects of income in the experience and mental health of employed and unemployed members of low-income families in a severely deprived community context; to the development of innovative participatory methodology, and to promote the interests of impoverished unemployed people through the research process as well as through the research outcome.

Developing empowering research practices with people who have learning disabilities

In this paper we report an exploratory attempt to design a practice that facilitates the extent to which ‘researched-upon’ and ‘researcher-on’ can be cooperatively involved in the planning, data collection and interpretation of research in the field of learning disability and community living. The informants were four people with learning disabilities who had been residents of long-stay mental hospitals but, at the time of the study, had all been living in the community for at least 1 year. After an extended period of informal familiarization, the research had three main phases. The first phase consisted of five individual, non-directive, depth interviews over a 2-month period. The second phase consisted of a meeting in which each participant became a paid co-researcher involved in the design and planning of the next phase of the research. The third phase consisted of three 1-hour guided neighbourhood tours led by the participants who had become co-researchers. Over the course of the three phases, the role of the researcher gradually became more a ‘newcomer-learner’ as he adopted the role of co-researcher and the role of participants with learning disabilities gradually became more ‘expert-teachers’ as they adopted the role of co-researchers. As the research progressed, the balance of power shifted, although modestly, in favour of those with learning disabilities. This led to an improvement in the quality and effectiveness of communication and understanding and an increase in the satisfaction with and enjoyment of the research process for all those involved.

Coping with Unemployment

It is now widely appreciated that there is a large and impressive literature on the psychological experience of unemployment that demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that unemployment has negative consequences for mental health. It is less widely appreciated, however, that this same research literature also reveals that despite the personal, social, collective, material, and other disadvantages of being unemployed, many people appear to cope fairly effectively with many aspects of unemployment. We have focused elsewhere on the psychological costs of unemployment. Here we focus on ways in which people appear to cope effectively with unemployment. In June of 1992 unemployment in the United Kingdom was calculated by the independent Unemployment Unit as 3,865,600, which represents 13.25 percent of the work force. The number of unemployed people has risen remorselessly each month for over two years (Unemployment Unit, 1992). Under these circumstances, it is risky to stimulate debate around the idea that unemployment can ever be a less than catastrophic experience; it is still more risky to suggest that some ways in which people cope fit rather uneasily with current conventional morality. We intend, therefore, neither to minimize the distress caused by unemployment, nor to individualize peoples experience of unemploy-

Stages in the psychological response to unemployment: A (dis)integrative review

There are widespread assertions in the literature on the psychological effects of unemployment that the response to job loss takes the form of qualitatively distinct stages or phases. This review gives an exposition of the main stage accounts, suggests reasons why such accounts appear compelling, and reveals what is entailed by the decision to hold such an account. When this is made clear the empirical evidence for a stage-by-stage account of unemployment experience is seen to be ambivalent at best. Most evidence is seriously flawed. Stage accounts are further criticized for inconsistency, internal contradictions, nonspecificity of domain, overindividualism, and restrictive ethnocentricity. It is suggested that evidence apparently supportive of stage accounts may be partly artifactual. Stage accounts are not recommended.

Poverty and Unemployment

In The World Employment Report 2001 the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2001) estimated that globally “at the end of 2000 some 160 million workers are unemployed, most of them first-time job-seekers,” about two-thirds of these in the so-called “developing” world. In addition, the WHO estimated that “about 500 million workers are unable to earn enough to keep their families above the US– 1 -a-day poverty line. These are almost entirely in the developing world. And of the workers who are not among the poor, many lack basic job and income security.” The situation appears to be deteriorating.

UNEMPLOYMENT AND MENTAL HEALTH: Hazards and Challenges of Psychology in the Community

There is persuasive evidence for both social causal and individual drift relationships between unemployment and mental health disorders over 80 years of massive social change, differing countries, vastly increasing research method sophistication and differing value assumptions. The number of people at risk of negative psychological effects of unemployment is appalling and usually greatly underestimated. There are also grounds for believing that unemployment negatively affects far more people than just those who are actually unemployed. Given the scale of unemployment and its negative consequences on mental health, interventions to prevent or reduce the psychological costs are clearly important. However many, perhaps most, actual interventions seem problematic regarding their psychological impacts and the dominant psychological account of what it is about being unemployed which causes mental health problems has a number of serious problems at a variety of levels. It is suggested that new ways of conceptualising and investigating the psychological problems of unemployment are needed and that in order to address the conditions which damage the mental health of both employed and unemployed people, it may well be necessary to redesign not only the substandard jobs of many employed people but also the jobs of unemployed people too.

A queer-theoretical approach to community health psychology

Queer-theoretical resources offer ways of productively rethinking how central concepts such as ‘person-context’, ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ may be understood for community health psychologists. This would require going beyond consideration of the problems with which queer theory is popularly associated to cautiously engage with the aspects of this work relevant to the promotion of collective practice and engaging with processes of marginalisation. In this article, we will draw upon and illustrate the queer-theoretical concepts of ‘performativity’ and ‘cultural intelligibility’ before moving towards a preliminary mapping of what a queer-informed approach to community health psychology might involve.

Unemployment and Mental Health

Unemployment has long been considered a risk factor for mental illness. This article briefly reviews the historical development and theoretical basis of this field of research, and summarizes the scientific evidence that unemployment causes mental health problems. Heterogeneity of this relationship by demographic and macroeconomic characteristics is also explored. Overall, unemployment at either the individual or aggregate level predicts substantial increased risk for mental health problems, including depression, suicide, and substance abuse. The magnitude of the effect of unemployment varies by mental health outcome. Notably, the adverse psychological impact of unemployment extends not just to people who lose their jobs, but to their families and communities as well.

The Future of Primary Prevention

The number of people living with mental health problems in western societies is appalling. Few have their mental health problem identified by their doctor. Fewer still receive specialist mental health services. Moreover, mental health problems are structured by social class, gender, poverty, relative deprivation and employment status with people from lower socio-economic groupings, women, people from relatively more deprived areas and unemployed people tending to have poorer mental and physical health. Mental health is also apparently deteriorating swiftly internationally. For example, the proportions of the U.S. population predicted to suffer a mental illness at some stage in their lives was revised from 10% in the 1960s, to 15% in the 1970s to 19% in 1985 (Albee, 1990). Many, probably most, mental health problems have their origins in our social and organisational arrangements and these arrangements are deteriorating apace. Involuntary unemployment is a well-documented major social cause of mental health problems, which is endemic and increasing in many parts of the world (Fryer, 1999a). However, unemployment is only one aspect of deleterious employment related experience. There are reasons to fear employment conditions are rapidly deteriorating with decreasing job security, employment increasingly bristling with stressors and both underand over-employment increasing in the new ‘flexible labour market’ (Fryer 1998; Dooley & Catalano, 1999). Moreover, the labour market is only one of very many potent social causes of health problems (Marmot and Wilkinson, 1999). Given the social aetiology and the huge scale of mental health problems, addressing the latter effectively through individual level intervention is impossible in both practice and theory. As Albee (e.g. 1990) has repeatedly made clear, it is inconceivable that enough professionals could be trained and employed to treat the many millions of casualties of our psychologically toxic social environments one at a time. Research shows that unemployment is intimately involved in the social

Photovoice: Doing Assessed Research as an Undergraduate from a Critical Standpoint

In this case study, we will describe a psychology honours project which started with, but also problematised, the notion of ‘lived experience’ of being labelled ‘mentally ill’ and ‘treated’ within an Australian psychiatric hospital. The research method we used was Photovoice, a method which involves group members taking photos and using them as ‘prompts’ for telling their stories of ‘lived experience’. This research project was theorised and conducted within a critical frame of reference, and therefore, we explicate what we mean by ‘frame of reference’ and ‘critical’ as well as describe how these contribute to the constitution of how we think, do research and perform ourselves. We will discuss how we deployed Photovoice and outline some issues we encountered in the everyday practice of doing a participatory and critical Photovoice research project. In doing so, we hope to demonstrate the potential of critical research as a tool of activist scholarship within assessed undergraduate studies in psychology.